(r\ &' . :.;, f t .;; , ':t, ,.. . ... ..'. ..... - .- , '-.".' . .".;. ..... '. .. '.' '. .. "" .+ :' :<<EL ài@L> :::::<: Æ8,;; -:)? ..:::::;.> , ' "'-' <- & tf... t ("\'" r: I ,; : ' '::c:; ; ;'" < :;,. ..,.,.,..,....:;....".;";'",,..,;:;;. ; f r ; " - - ey_ , . 'i.Hi ',' '. ,"Çe r 1wÐ : : .;'0! <v V t ;f::::; U pg:W;;': ::;I:t '. J Mt6 ; ., ft?,., hA:J7A tA(Ý <' E;: r7r'Çj S ht?ln*'l Vì "He makes it look so damn easy. " . people realize." Foster told Phelan that she had to do something about Chris Killip and Nancy Mitchnick, two VE.S. teachers whose abrasive manners and rough language were upsetting the stafE Phelan spoke to both offenders; she didn't have the authority, she said, to reprimand or discipline senior faculty, but she did ask Mitchnick to step down as head tutor. Phelan was not teaching a course during the fall semester. For the first time in her six years at Har- vard, she spent more time away from the campus-a week in New York, a week in Europe-and this became a factor in the absenteeism charge that Knowles cited. Throughout the fall and winter, relations between faculty and staff grew steadily worse. Up until the end, Phelan thought that she had a good working relationship with the Dean, and thought that she knew him pretty well. Born in England in 1935 and schooled at Oxford, where he taught until coming to Harvard, in 1974, Jeremy Knowles was a scientist with important discoveries to his credit in the areas where chemistry and bio- chemistry overlap. He was also witty, incisive, and charming when he chose to be. As the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Knowles became a powerful man at Harvard, with juris- diction over the faculties of every un- dergraduate department; he was an effi- cient and diplomatic administrator who consulted with his colleagues on im- 48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 15, 2002 . portant issues, but he could also inter- vene unilaterally in specific cases, and he was implacable about budgets. In retrospect, Chris Killip believes that Ellen Phelan's downfall began with an incident in 1999, when Phelan, acting on her own initiative, went down to New York one weekend and raised the money to hire four additional part-time teachers. "Ellen actually thought the Dean would be pleased," Killip says, "but that's not how things work here." Others say that it was Phelan's indiscretion that did her in. Frustrated by the constant struggle to fund her program, she had ta1ked openly of leaving to take a job at Yale. Worse, she had ta1ked about going to dinner at the home of President Rudenstine and his wife, whom she knew before any of them went to Harvard. (Angelica Rudenstine is a highly regarded art historian.) Neil Rudenstine told me recently that he "thought the world" of Ellen Phelan, and that he strongly supported her program. There is lime doubt that his retirement last year weakened her position, but even before that, according to some observers, there had been a cooling in the once warm friendship between Rudenstine and Knowles, whose commitment to studio art as an academic discipline was not as clear as Rudenstine's. D ean Knowles agreed to ta1k with me on the condition that I not ask about the events involving Phelan and V.E.S. A slim, self-contained man in a sober gray suit, he could not have been more cordial. A Harvard friend had described Knowles to me as being "right out of Gilbert and Sullivan," and he did have some noticeably theatri- cal mannerisms-eyebrows arching, hands and arms in frequent motion, a battery of nods and droll facial expres- sions to accent his verbal points. ''At Harvard, you know, we have six orches- tras," he said, consulting one of several documents he was holding. "Twenty- five years ago, there were two. We have seventeen dance groups, and thirteen a-cappella singing groups. There are more than five hundred concerts a year at Harvard College, given by under- graduates." When I suggested that a good argument could perhaps be made for keeping these and similar activi- ties, including studio arts, outside the formal curriculum of a liberal-arts col- lege, Knowles replied that this question had been discussed many times, in the faculty room across the hall. "It's a very interesting question," he said. "Where is the edge of the curriculum? If I step back and say what I'm concerned about, I'm concerned about the whole experi- ence of undergraduates in this college. So, where the line is drawn between the curricular and the noncurricular is in a sense less important than that there be opportunity all the way from the most theoretical and bookish activity to practice. From thinking about to doing. What you're asking is where do you draw this line. I am moving my hands because in different institutions the line is in different places." I asked whether there were likely to be changes made in the VE.S. program under the new chair, Marjorie Garber, and the Dean told me gently that I was treading on forbidden territory, or "sin- ning," as he put it. He also explained that a departmental chair was a rotating position that had to do not with author- ity but with leadership. And the pro- gram? "We want to educate the truly and deeply talented artists," he said, "and also to open the eyes, to improve the visual literacy, of the economists and physicists-people who come to college with no particular bent or interest or background in the arts. . . . But we mustn't pretend to be an art school, just as we don't pretend to be a drama school " or a conservatory.